August 2008 Archives

If you missed the live version of former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker "Fiscal Wake Up Tour," a new documentary that was the darling of the Sundance Festival captures the central message Walker would talk about to anyone who would listen: the US government is broke and broken.

The numbers tell at least some of the story: The federal government has dug itself a $53 trillion financial hole and keeps digging $2 trillion to $3 trillion deeper every year.  If those numbers have too many zeroes to feel relevant, it works out to $175,000 of debt for every American.

But the story is more than the numbers.  And that is where documentary director Patrick Creadon comes in.  Creadon, who you may remember from his charming 2006 film about puzzles and those who make and play them (Word Play), begins to unpack the puzzle of how we got here and what to do about it now.

In early reviews, it has been praised for doing for public finance what an Inconvenient Truth did for the environment.  But the live Fiscal Wake Up Tour from which the film draws was much less polemical than the Al Gore keynote presentations about climate change.  And it is worth noting that Creadon's work to date is more about compelling storytelling than the ideological screeds for which Michael Moore or D.A. Pennebaker are known.

That said, there is ideology and world view at work here, but in a more non-partisan way than you might expect. Groups as different as the Concord Coalition, Brookings Institution, Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute were all on the tour and agreed that America's fiscal policies and practices were and are unsustainable.  Expect a largely unchallenged contention that entitlement programs are the problem.  Their death, not just reform, is central to ever climbing out of the super-sized fiscal hole.

And lest I bury my lede, I.O.U.S.A debuts on the big screen in a live event (tape delayed on the west coast) that includes an after-movie discussion with Warren Buffett, Alan Greenspan, Paul O'Neill, Robert Rubin and Paul Volcker.  It is scheduled for this Thursday in theatres across the country -- which can be found through the film's official website.

A gathering of executives from leading system integrators and related technology companies gathered on August 11 for a day long examination of state and local government in Colorado Springs, CO. It was the second annual Industry Summit, convened by the Center for Digital Government.

The hundred or so industry delegates allowed an anonymous peak under the covers of their respective companies' prime targets in SLG. It is not at all surprising the public safety and human services topped the list but, interestingly, there was consensus on only two items -- on enterprise IT infrastructure near the top of the list and parks and recreation at the very bottom.



Slicing the market by the technologies in which government is likely to invest, infrastructure again topped the list -- second only to virtualization (which may be an aspirational ranking, given the composition of the audience).  Interestingly, the industry reps see a continuing government focus on information security, consolidation and connectivity.  They see only middling opportunities for legacy modernization, shared services and software-as-a-service.  Representing sales organizations as they do, the results also indicate three items that just don't seem ready to move -- sadly, they are business process models and identity/ access management.